ABSTRACT
Hermann Ebbinghaus once said that psychology is a discipline with a long past but a short history (Shakow, 1930). It has a short history because psychology did not receive formal recognition as a unified and independent discipline until Wilhelm Wundt established his laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879 (Murray, 1983). A few years later in 1885, Ebbinghaus published his first book, On Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, and introduced “an experimental and quantitative approach” to investigate the “manifestations of memory” ( Ebbinghaus, 1885/2011, p. xiii; see also Nicolas, 2006). From the very beginning, Ebbinghaus knew that his approach was a radical departure from the dominant, descriptive approach. In fact, in the preface of his book, he pleaded with his readers to withhold judgment about the “practicability” of this approach. Since then, memory science has flourished and knowledge has expanded; however, it is remarkable that all this was accomplished within a span of a little over 100 years. By comparison, the natural sciences had a head start by at least 100 years; for instance, in physics, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the heliocentric theory of the universe in 1543, and in chemistry, Antonie-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered the role of oxygen in combustion in 1778.
